Google has revamped its search engine to prioritize valuable content and combat low-quality information. This update, rolled out in March 2024, aims to enhance the user experience by elevating informative and trustworthy content in search results.
“Today we announced the March 2024 core update & new spam policies that, in combination, are designed to show less content made to attract clicks and more content that people find useful.” – Google said on X (Twitter).
Today we announced the March 2024 core update & new spam policies that, in combination, are designed to show less content made to attract clicks and more content that people find useful. Learn more: https://t.co/wQVZ8mExRB
— Google Search Central (@googlesearchc) March 5, 2024
What Is A Google Core Update?
A Google Core Update is a significant change made to Google’s search ranking algorithm, typically occurring a few times a year. These updates aim to improve the overall quality and relevance of search results by:
- Re-evaluating how content is assessed: Google tweaks the complex formula they use to rank webpages, placing more emphasis on factors that align with their vision of valuable and helpful content.
- Demoting unhelpful content: Web pages deemed low-quality, uninformative, or primarily focused on search engine manipulation may see their rankings decrease.
- Elevating valuable content: Conversely, high-quality content that prioritizes user needs and provides genuine information may rise in search rankings.
It’s important to note that Google core updates are not targeted towards specific websites or pages. Instead, they broadly impact the ranking system itself, potentially reshuffling the order of web pages displayed for various search queries. This can lead to both positive and negative changes in rankings for individual websites, depending on how well their content aligns with the updated criteria.
The Google March 2024 core update & new spam policies to improve search result quality and combat spammy content. Here’s a summary of the key points:
Core Update:
- Focuses on elevating helpful content and demoting unoriginal content, building on efforts from 2022.
- Aims to better understand webpages that are unhelpful, have poor user experience, or seem primarily created for search engines.
New Spam Policies:
- Scaled content abuse: Creating large amounts of low-value, unoriginal content (manual or automated) is now considered spam.
- Site reputation abuse: Publishing low-value third-party content solely to manipulate search rankings through the host site’s reputation is prohibited (effective May 5, 2024).
- Expired domain abuse: Buying expired domains solely to host low-quality content leveraging the domain’s past reputation is against Google’s policies.
Overall, these Google updates aim to provide users with a more helpful and trustworthy search experience by prioritizing content that is genuinely informative and user-focused.
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